


Alien Observer

by Innocuate



Category: Metroid (Manga), Metroid Series
Genre: Depression, Dissociation, Isolation, Mental Health Issues, Minor Character(s), Outer Space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:21:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26737279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Innocuate/pseuds/Innocuate
Summary: And so, to increase my body's ability to adapt to this dangerous world, the Chozo integrated their traditions into mine. With time it would craft me into the strongest being in the universe.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	Alien Observer

She sits in a large, uncomfortable chair aboard the spaceship, distracting herself by looking at its metal walls. Her expression is even and empty. There is something akin bread in her hand, crumbling and half-eaten: she fingers its flakes mindlessly and they fall into her lap.

A pair of worried caretakers sit opposite her. They exchange solemn words, watching her emotionless demeanor with discomfort. There is hand wringing and holding between them. They mourn something not yet lost.

The ship stops. A destination alarm rings. They’ve reached the drop-off point.

She stands and brushes herself off, not looking at them as she approaches the ship airlock.

“Goodbye,” they say.

Her hand is on the airlock portal. It does not open. Its handle is loose and operable; her struggle is internal. She fails to look back. “Bye.”

The airlock seals and she suits. The outfit’s closeness to her skin gives no comfort. Pressure releases, the hatch opens, and she is jettisoned, alone.

The ship hangs for a moment before its thrusters burn and pilot away.

Space. She is eleven years old. Three hundred miles above the surface of her planet, she falls into orbit with nothing but her suit and its life support. She will spend one planetary cycle here before seeing her family again, thousands upon thousands of hours in solitude.

Seven seconds have elapsed in the first minute.

Her breathing paces as she swirls between view of the scorched orange surface and the stars beyond, spinning and still, beautiful if not for their vast emptiness. If it is any consolation, she was lonely even before she got here. But the hurt worms in regardless. Hurt at being left behind, at being abandoned, isolated for a cause that feels far from love. She does not want her resolve tested with experiments devised by her parents. No, this does not seem an opportunity for her growth and security of self. It seems like punishment. And in the early moments of flailing seclusion in the cosmos her first emotions are anger, hate, distrust, and loathing, directed at those who ejected her from their lives, then at herself, because they are not present. She uses the suit’s defenses to fire beams of rage streaking light at the planet and faraway suns. They fling through the void, trailing soundlessly, and dissipate in nothing. No-one is listening. She weeps unseen.

One minute.

One hundred ninety-two hours.

She is in retrograde, her personality collapsing in on itself like a dying star.

A month.

The spacesuit is neurologically sensitive; it detects extreme mania that lasts unhealthily long, a cauterization within her skull. A depression follows that lasts twenty-eight days. Her limited brain activity is deathlike. Afterward, the suit records her talking to herself. She uses her regular tenor, then switches to a voice invented, and a conversation lasts until her voices give out to continue within. When she can speak again it is a variety of tones: a flood of people. The mania comes back and turns to panic. Were there atmosphere you could hear screams. The suit supplies a benzodiazepine, locks her movement, and tries to force her mood. She attempts to slam her head against the inside of her helmet and its cushioning offers her nothing. When the suit releases, she curls fetal, rotating slowly in an empty womb.

Six months.

She has lived in her memory to experience every second of her life over again. Those moments she couldn’t recall, she created, to try and feel comfort. Once she returned to here and now she kept going and envisioned her horrible life beyond. She thought of coming back to the surface and being told her training was incomplete. She would need to start again. In present, halfway through her mission, she somehow convinces herself it is her second time here, an infinite cycle of emptiness in the abyss. She will never leave.

A fantastical universe full of peace and adventure materializes in her mind. It offers false happiness for forty days. She makes another. Thirteen days.

She loses track. Her birthday passes.

A speck appears on the horizon, at first perfectly unnoticed. She has almost all but forgot she is floating in space. With minute-like days it enters orbit with her and comes awash with color from the nearby sun, a meteoroid, brown and full of iron. It is on track to softly collide with her lifeless body. While she is sleeping, her back slowly rests on the rock, and it begins to carry her. She dreams of being held and awakes to the first feeling of ground in a functional eternity. It is the size of a small hill: she clambers its mass, genuine euphoria in the palpation of dust and ice. The electricity of her nerves sensing solid matter is indescribable. This place is God in her fragile consciousness, hers, something finally to hold and love and own. She explores like a backyard child and finds an opening on the back of the rock.

There is movement inside. Two dozen small, hemispherical, spiny-shelled blue creatures avoid external sunlight. She knows them from her instruction at home, she remembers the words from her relapsed life. They are intergalactic hitchhikers. They spread from planet to planet as an infestation, eating nutrients from natural ore, carrying a host of diseases. Poor for ecosystems and biodiversity. But they are real. Alive. She thinks of the creatures on the planet below, the unanchored earth grounding her. These interstellar beings would likely bring plague to her world. They are a pestilence, better left eradicated before this asteroid lands and they multiply.

A glint signals from deeper in the opening. She follows it, moving cautiously around the lifeforms. Behind them is a geode. Unmarked by their scavenging, the smooth surface of its crystals reflect her suit’s light. She is reminded that she has a body. A face. She looks into her eyes and touches the glass. She is real and alive too. Tears pool around the neckline of her helmet. There is life in spite of all this nothingness. She is here with these creatures, they exist in unison even with the inhospitable vacuum. It is all part of reality flowing with energy and existence. Her heart is overwhelmed.

She spends four days there, watching the slow eating patterns of the aliens, and then kicks off.

* * *

Home, a briefing room. Before she can see her caretakers again she must be assessed. An artificial intelligence called Mother speaks to her; it is the first voice she hears as she’s born again in gravity.

“WHAT WAS LEARNED FROM THIS EXPERIENCE.”

She is distracting herself by looking at the room’s metal walls. Hundreds of times over the past year she has prepared for this conversation but now the words escape her. The creatures in the asteroid are scavenging within her psyche. She breathes. “I thought about things that live.”

Mother makes a memetic note. “SUIT RECORDS INDICATE AN ENCOUNTER WITH A SCOURGE OF LIFEFORMS IN LOW ORBIT. THEY HAVE CRASHLANDED ON OUR PLANET AND INVADED THE LOCAL BIOSPHERE. THERE WAS NO ATTEMPT MADE TO STOP THEM DESPITE KNOWLEDGE OF THEIR DANGER.”

“Yes.”

“WHY.”

Mother’s video eye surveys her as she thinks over nine thousand hours of being apart. She recalls her hatred in the first moments, and her despondence, and what she found, and how she carried it with her through the final months. Why?

“Because,” she says. “I didn’t want to.”


End file.
